Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

“15Therefore He is the mediator of the New Covenant, so that those called for an eternal inheritance might receive the promise, since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions committed under the first covenant. 16For where there is a covenant, it is necessary for the one making the covenant to proffer a death. 17For a covenant is secured by deaths, since it is never strong whilst the one making the covenant is alive.

18Therefore not even the first covenant was established apart from blood. 19For after all the commandments had been spoken in accord with the Law by Moses to all the people, he, taking the blood of young-bulls and goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, sprinkled both the book and all the people. 20He did this saying, “This is the blood of the covenant which God commanded you.” 21And both the tent and all the vessels used for ministering were likewise sprinkled with blood. 22Now it is almost the case that under the law everything is cleansed with blood, and apart from the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”

The majority—if not all—of commentators understand a shift in these verses from the ‘covenants’ to the more specific form of a covenant known as a will (both the same word, διαθηκη, diathēkē). The problem, as I see it, is that the meticulous argumentation the author of Hebrews uses falls apart on this translation—the parallels drawn are purely verbal (a death occurs in both cases), not conceptual. Yet, there is another way to translate this verse. I suggest that the author is presupposing what he has established and what the OT and NT teach, that covenants require priestly sacrifices to cover the transgressions of their sinful participants (v. 15, 22): only if the sin problem is dealt with can the covenant be valid.

Why then is a death required to make the covenant secure? Because the sinful transgressions of the one side making the covenant require redemption. It is not that “wherever there is a will, the death of the one making it needs to be demonstrated”: the idea that we receive our inheritance because of a will, contingent upon the death of the one making the will, is not found elsewhere in Hebrews or in the Bible—our inheritance does not rest in the death of the one from whom we receive it but in Jesus Christ’s receiving of the inheritance through perfect obedience and our participation in His inheritance.

A better interpretation is to read διαθηκη (diathēkē) as ‘covenant’ and understand the genitive του διαθεμενου (tou diathemenou, “of the one making it”) not with θανατοv (thanaton, “death”) but αναγκη (anankē, “necessity”): where there is a covenant, “where there is a covenant, it is necessary for the one making the covenant to proffer a death.” That is, the one making a covenant needs to provide a sacrifice. Why? because “a covenant is secured by deaths”: notice the plural, the one making a will cannot die multiple times, but one making a covenant can slaughter many animals (v. 19). Why do we need the deaths of animals, or in this case Christ? Because “[the covenant] is never strong while the one making the covenant is alive”: if it was a covenant between God and God this would not be true, but in the case of finite and sinful men and women, every moment the human partner is alive, the covenant is in jeopardy! Any sin could snap the covenant, so it needs a sacrifice so that no matter the mistakes they make in their life, the covenant is upheld.

The logic then makes sense: why is a death necessary? because finite men and women necessitate it. Why can we, then, receive the promise? Because Jesus has died once for all time securing for us the forgiveness of sins and redeeming transgressions so that the New Covenant would be valid and secure in the place of the old.

68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God. (John 6:68-69)

When many disciples had abandoned Jesus, offended by his words, Peter and the apostles response was to hold fast to Jesus; why? Where else would they go: if Jesus was who He said He was, then in Him alone was hope and truth. The same can, and should, be said of our doctrine of Scripture. If Scripture is what it claims to be—the very words of the eternal creator, the trustworthy Lord of all—then where else could we turn? It is through the Scriptures that we today know Jesus to be the sinless Son of God who died for our sins and rose again for our justification, if we abandon them, where then is our hope? Will we turn to tradition? The creeds and the Fathers all build on the Scriptures: without a trustworthy foundation supporting their teachings, their testimony is useless. Will we turn to history? it may—and that is a big ‘may’—tell us what happened, but it cannot tell us the significance of what happened. Will we turn to science? it may give us much insight into the world and testify to the glorious creativity of our Lord, but it rests itself on God’s testimony that creation is rational and orderly—that there is unity to the chaos of matter—to function. Will we turn to experience, subjective judgment? without God’s testimony that He created the heavens and the earth, that creation is real and there is God guiding it in His sovereign power, I would have no way of knowing that I exist, let alone that anyone else exists—that I can trust my senses, that there is rationality behind experience so that I can trust the law of non-contradiction.

If the God of Scripture is who He says He is, how can we go anywhere else other than His self-revelation? If God exists, an attempt to live consistently in the world apart from Him can only descend into the utter chaos of nihilistic egoism without a hope of knowing anything. I came to know God and cherish His Word because “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). But I now cling fast, for where else could I turn? Having beheld the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, where else could I turn, where else could I ground my hope, my joy? Where else could I look for strength in the day of trouble than the fount of God’s self-revelation in Scripture? I hold fast to Scripture because the God I see there is infinitely beautiful and glorious, holding fast my gaze (2 Cor. 3:7-18), and because without this firm foundation, I would be caught adrift in a bottomless sea of skepticism, subverted by the hopeless attempt to explain a created universe apart from its creator. As David held fast God’s Word amidst the trials of physical affliction, I know I must hold fast the Word in the midst of the epistemological onslaught leveled at me by the World around:

In this paper, the author looks at Jeremiah 34:17-22 in its literary context to better understand the passage and why the author of Jeremiah has put it in its present place. Particular attention is paid to the maledictory oath in 34:18-19.

Our culture today faces an authority crisis, and too often Christians get caught up in it; if we are to truly make, multiply, and mature disciples, we need to be clear on where our true authority lies. In the world around us, authority is essentially found in oneself—someone’s perception of what is true and good—and is mediated through the sciences—what can be measured and tested—, reason—what we can rationally conclude from our own thinking—, or oneself—what is felt or experienced in visions and trances. It seems all too easy for us to make these our authorities as well.

In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul addresses a church that is being deceived by the traditions of man and departing from the true faith; addressing this wavering, Paul makes it clear where his authority lies and so clears the question for us. The teaching Paul has delivered to the Galatians is consistent with the rest of the apostolic preaching (2:7-9), but Paul goes out of his way to show that though his teaching is identical to theirs, it does not originate with them. Why does he do this? Paul knows that God is his true authority, not man, and Paul can trace his gospel directly to Jesus Christ (1:11-12). Paul, as an apostle of the risen lord, has authority to teach and rebuke all the churches, but he is under no illusion as to where his authority comes from.

Paul’s ultimate authority was God and all that He had spoken. Unlike Paul we will not hear Jesus’ voice come from heaven in a cascade of light (Acts 9:3-6), nor will we receive private revelation from the Lord (Gal. 1:11-12), but we do have God’s Word. Jesus prays, in John 17, for God to sanctify his people in truth; He immediately identifies the source of that truth as the Scriptures (17). Paul identifies later all Scripture as God’s authoritative, breathed out, Word (2 Tim. 3:16, cf. 2 Pet. 3:2, 16). Unlike the culture around us, we do not need to languish in a vacuum of truthlessness, rather we have truth—God’s perspective on all reality—available at our fingertips. Where do we go when we are in crisis, when we are in doubt, when we need reassurance of the truth of our faith, or to be grounded in the Gospel? For Paul, it was to God’s Word; may it be so for us.

“He became man, that we might become God,” shouts the wild-eyed preacher with passionate glee; is he a disciple of the New Age movement infiltrating the church? Maybe he is a pantheistic practitioner of Eastern Mysticism eager to introduce Eastern philosophy? The truth is, he is none of the above; the words are not those of a Yogi or New Age mystic but of the early church father and staunch defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy, Athanasius.[1]

Though these words may be out of place in many Protestant churches, they have long found a receptive audience in the sanctuaries of the Orthodox Church. Following in the footsteps of the Eastern Fathers, they still teach the doctrine of deification, so shockingly captured in Athanasius’ famous quote. Though the doctrine of deification, or theōsis, did not originate with Athanasius, he is unique among the early Fathers for making it the centre of His theological system.[2] Because of its centrality to his thought, Athanasius provides a great opportunity to understand deification in history. The purpose of this paper is to interact with his thought and answer two questions: What did Athanasius mean when he spoke of deification? Should it make a difference to our beliefs today? To answer these questions, we will first briefly trace the theme deification in the thought of Athanasius on the incarnation, his explicit teachings about deification, and his thought on how we are deified. We will then briefly analyze Athanasius’ teaching in light of Scripture. Finally, we will conclude with a summary of the doctrine and its veracity, with some preliminary thoughts on its application to contemporary Protestant thought.

Athanasius’ teaching about deification did not emerge out of a void; it was strongly tied to the circumstances of his life. As a young man, Athanasius was a deacon close to Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria.[3] Before he took over the Alexandrian episcopate, Athanasius found himself playing a key role in the controversy over the heterodox teaching of a fellow Alexandrian, the presbyter Arius.[4] Though it was officially condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, Athanasius’ battles with Arianism would consume the rest of his life and lead to 40 years of hardship, with persecution and exile.[5] In his controversy with Arius, deification became one of Athanasius’ key arguments for Christ’s deity. He argued that for us to be deified in Christ, He could not have been deified Himself. He must have been fully man so that He could taste death for us and unite our humanity to Himself[6] and fully God so that, through our union with Him, we might be exalted and become partakers of the divine nature.[7] It was Athanasius’ contention that only by being fully God Himself could Jesus invite us to partake of His own nature as God.[8]

Because his teaching on deification was so intimately tied to his anti-Arian polemic and incarnational theology, what he has to say is scattered throughout all of his works without a single systematic explication of the doctrine. Though the idea is scattered throughout variegated contexts, there appears to be a few consistent themes throughout that explain what exactly Athanasius meant by deification. The first theme, in which the others consist, is the restoration of the Image of God. Humans, as those created in the image of God, were able to contemplate and have communion with Him,[9] but in the fall, they sought those things nearer to themselves, lost the image of God, and now languished in corruption.[10] Much of Athanasius’ thought on deification can be understood as the restoration of humans to what they were meant to be—the perfect and unblemished image of God. The restoration of this image allows man to know God once again; through this restoration, we “receive the idea of the unseen Father.”[11] In deification, we receive “knowledge of the invisible Father.”[12] Being restored in the image of God, humans are united with God and share in communion with him. Sharing in the divine life and being united with Christ is both deification and the means by which deification happens.[13] Though the restoration of the image is the head under which the rest of the themes are found, the most prominent theme is the perfection of humans;[14] in deification, they become incorruptible, morally pure, and immortal. In the fall we entered into a corruptible state; we are mortal and immoral.[15] Through our union with Christ, Christian deification involves being clothed in incorruption—being freed from sin—and the inheritance of immortality—receiving everlasting life with God.[16]

For Athanasius, this process of deification—being restored to the image of God and so knowing Him, having communion with Him, and being perfected in Him—is something that happens progressively in this life and culminates in the resurrection.[17] Though it is ultimately by grace,[18] it is a work of the Holy Spirit working synergistically with believers as they use the means of grace provided for them (baptism, Eucharist, asceticism, etc.).[19]

So far we have looked at what deification was to Athanasius, now we must briefly ask: Is it true? Though the word itself invites all sorts of pantheistic speculation, nothing that Athanasius seems to have taught about deification departs from Christian Theism. Though our deification makes us sons of God by grace and even, in some vague sense, “divine,” we do not come to share in the essence of God.[20] All that remains is to ask if it can be found in Scripture.

The primary text to which proponents of deification, including Athanasius, turn is 2 Peter 1:4. Here we read that by God’s glory and excellence, believers will “become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.”[21] In context, Peter’s focus is on the moral behavior of believers (vv. 3, 4d, 5-7, 8-9),[22] and so most commentators agree that he is referring to the escape of the believer from the sinfulness of the flesh—God’s gift of moral perfection or at least the ability to fight immorality.[23] Athanasius’ understanding of deification as incorruptibility and immortality is in line with Peter’s thought, for the result of moral perfection is release from the consequences of sin, being freed from death and decay.[24] The other aspects of Athanasius’ thought are nowhere in Scripture associated with being made partakers of the divine nature, but—other than his understanding of the image of God—are attested to under different theological categories.[25]

What then is to be made of all of this? For Athanasius, deification is the restoration of humankind to God’s image—meaning that they can know Him, are united in communion with Him, and are being perfected through this unity. It is worked out in this life but will ultimately find its consummation in the resurrection. Though his understanding of the image of God is not what is intended in Genesis, his understanding of deification as incorruptibility and immortality is a solid inference from 2 Peter 1:4. The rest of his understandings of deification correlate roughly with the Protestant doctrines of adoption, sanctification, glorification, and being in Christ.

Though deification here is consistent with Christian Theism and Scriptural teachings, it would be best to avoid using it as a dominating theological theme[26] or as its own area of soteriology. What deification covers is elsewhere in Scripture referred to by sanctification and glorification. We would be best to use these more consistent Scriptural labels and avoid the possibilities of misunderstanding pregnant in the term deification. That being said, because of the orthodox nature of Athanasius’ thought in this area, discussion of glorification with the term deification could do well for ecumenical discussion with the Eastern Church. Finally, because Scripture does speak of us partaking of the divine nature, we would do well to wrestle through the profound implications of what it means for man to be glorified.

Bibliography

Athanasius. “Contra Arianos.” In Bettenson, Henry, ed. The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

———. “De Incarnatione.” In Bettenson, Henry, ed. The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

———. “De Synodis.” In Quasten, Johannes. Patrology: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature From the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon. Vol. 3. Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1963.

Finch, Jeffrey. “Athanasius on the Deifying Work of the Redeemer.” In Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, edited by Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov. Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2006.

[7] Athanasius, “Four Discourses Against the Arians,” in Athanasius and Robertson, NPNF2, 4:316.

[8] Athanasius, “De Synodis,” in Johannes Quasten, Patrology: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature From the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon, vol. 3 (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1963), 71–72.

[22] Though Bauckham sees ἀρετή (aretē) in v. 3 as being virtually synonymous with δοξα and referring to “the manifestation of divine power,” it is best to follow Schreiner in taking it as a reference to Jesus’ goodness, or moral virtue—both because of its common use in Greek literature and its use in v. 5. Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1983), 178–179; Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, The new American commentary v. 37 (Nashville, Tenn: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 292–293.